Sunday, January 31, 2010

Movie Quote of the Day (“Ace in the Hole,” on Prayer)


Lorraine Mimosa (played by Jan Sterling): “I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”—Ace in the Hole (1951), written by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman, based on a story by Victor Desny, directed by Billy Wilder

Today’s post might, at first glance, look out of place on this blog, when Sunday “Quotes of the Day” are given over to religious/spiritual themes. I’d argue to the contrary (which, longtime readers will know, is my wont).

I’m aware, as much as anyone, that overt religious sentiment was exceedingly rare in a Billy Wilder film. I know that he fled Europe in the 1930s because he was born into a Jewish family (one that, tragically, stayed behind and perished in Auschwitz), but I’m not sure how much he held to the faith of his ancestors when he reached the U.S.

None of this is to say, however, that this delightful cynic did not hold to a moral code. And, in Ace in the Hole, a film that examined his early calling—journalism—with particular unblinking amusement, he regarded the postwar landscape of his adopted country as a kind of Hieronymus Bosch vision of modern hell.

I’ve meant to write about this seminal entry in the Wilder filmography for a long time, but for one reason or another kept avoiding it. Then I received some inadvertent prodding from my college friend (and fellow cinephile) Steve. I can’t equal either his colorful prose or his shrewd observations, but…here goes.

There are, to be sure, users and exploiters in this film, perhaps more than in any other Wilder directed. But there were also principles and (surprisingly for Wilder) sacred observances whose violation provoked his wit and righteous anger. The loss of a soul, he tells us, is not pretty.

A treasure-hunter in some Indian caves in New Mexico gets trapped when a mountain tunnel caves in. His physical predicament mirrors the psychological dilemma of down-on-his-luck reporter Chuck Tatum (played by Kirk Douglas), who has been driven to the vast empty reaches of the Southwest and away from the urban Northeast he loves because of drinking, adultery, a casual approach to the truth, and other large and small betrayals of body and spirit.

Leo Mimosa’s enclosure, Chuck hopes, will allow him to break out of his own career trap through a string of scoops. There’s a short, simple way to save Leo—solidifying some cave passages--but to keep his string of headlines going Chuck needs to involve Leo’s wife Lorraine, the rescue engineer, and the town sheriff in an elaborate web of deceit: that a whole new tunnel, taking days to build, is required instead.

All of this is perpetrated on a public that, several years after “The Good War,” is so caught up in sensation that it has lost whatever sense of purpose and self-sacrifice it once possessed.

Ace in the Hole might only have been rivaled by Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) as the worst flop of Wilder’s long and legendary career, but he was rightly proud of his work here. In its bitterly sardonic satire on human greed and folly, it’s cinema’s answer to Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

The role of Chuck provided Kirk Douglas with perhaps the least sympathetic of the hard-edged anti-heroes in which he specialized at this point (Champion, Detective Story, The Bad and the Beautiful). But the part of bottle-blonde, two-timing Lorraine proved a career-changer for Sterling, who, until then, had been relegated to something far closer to her real-life persona: elegance.

Though it features no private eyes, Ace in the Hole (which, after its disastrous premiere, was withdrawn and re-released with a new title, The Big Carnival) has, I think, correctly been viewed as a variation on film noir. The darkness within the cave is analogous to what's inside Chuck's soul. And Chuck and Lorraine, like the larcenous couple at the heart of Wilder’s great venture into the noir style, Double Indemnity, see the husband who forms the third part of their triangle as their ticket to something more.

In fact, Chuck and Lorraine’s affair is portrayed even less sympathetically than Walter and Phyllis’. How can a pair of murderers come off better than a pair of users? Simple: the way to hell is lit in Double Indemnity through a grand if illicit passion; the relationship between Chuck and Lorraine, on the other hand, feels like no more than the mating of scorpions.

The best way to convey a moral, Wilder realized, is to pretend to do anything but that. That’s one way to interpret that company name listed behind Lorraine in the photo accompanying this post, “The Great S&M Amusement Corp.” (Hollywood’s censors—the so-called “Hays Office”—must have been too busy fighting with Wilder about something else to realize the joke lurking in the background of this frame.)

The above quote offers a useful means of examining their complementary relationship. The act Chuck persuades Lorraine to commit—attending church to pray for her husband’s safety—is hypocritical, given her almost comical irreverence; but the manner in which Chuck discovers the cave-in and Leo’s background feels like a violation.

Chuck and his reporter-sidekick have come into an office out in the middle of nowhere when they hear loud murmuring, almost imploring, in the next room. Chuck ignores his companion’s urging not to go in, finding Leo’s mother, a Hispanic woman, praying, simply but devoutly, for her son's safe deliverance. She is completely unaware of Chuck's presence, which feels like a massive intrusion, similar to the betrayal of trust he will soon perpetrate on her son and the larger community.

Leo’s entrapment, Chuck suggests in an article that forms a part of the media frenzy that soon ensues, may be a form of retribution for intruding into the sacred space of Native Americans—“The Curse of the Seven Vultures.” But his own retribution for a similar offense comes at the hands of his female partner in corruption and artifice.

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